Computer Graphics World

December 2008 30 ■ ■ ■ ■ VFX/ Post the now starkly graphic image. "I could be on the phone with a studio and show them what I wanted," he says. In addition, Ris- ing Sun also added color correction to the CineSync tool set during e Spirit's post- production. To provide raw material for the digital backgrounds, Maschwitz took still images in New York City and Montreal, and drew from his personal library of 80,000 photo- graphs. "I had tons of photographs of cobblestone streets, falling-apart buildings, and water towers, and shots taken from rooftops," he says. "is movie is Frank's [Miller] love letter to New York. His pen- sive hero sits on the skyline and ponders." Studios working on the film created the backgrounds using layers of matte paint- ings, photography, and sometimes 3D ele- ments. At e Orphanage, for example, art- ists working in the Foundry's Nuke created matte paintings, which they layered using that software's 3D cameras and multiplane projections. "We had a couple sequences with full 3D, but we sent a lot of the 3D se- quences to the other houses," McBride says. Maschwitz singles out Riot's work on underwater scenes, Fuel and Entity FX's contributions to the finale, Look Effects' broad daylight shots in a digital Central City, Digital Dimension's mud-pit fight, and e Orphanage's shots in a hospital room, which he calls "insanely realistic." e high-res reviews happened on the Nucoda where, with Rhodes' help, Masch- witz could fine-tune the shots and make color adjustments. Once the final, high-res shots came into the Bunker, Maschwitz and Rhodes considered whether to ask for ad- justments or finish the work on the Nucoda. "e DI integration was extremely helpful," McBride says. "e film had such a stylistic look, it was quick and easy for them to make color adjustments, fine-tune each shot, and bring the shots together in a sequence quick- ly. It cut out a lot of back and forth." McBride explains that it is typical for finals, sent to a client, to need tweaking once the client sees all the shots in context. Usually when that happens, the shots come back to the visual effects studio. e studio re-renders and resubmits them, and they go through another round of approvals, which could take as long as a week. And the same thing could happen again in DI. "On this film, they cut all that out," Mc- Bride says. "Instead of sending the shots back, Stu [Maschwitz] and Aaron [Rhodes] usually had enough color range in the file to make the adjustments on their own. If a shot was 95 percent final, they could often finish that last five percent. e feedback was quick. Sometimes, real time. And because we got quicker feedback, we had more time to be creative." at's what Maschwitz had in mind. "Usually, visual effects is death by a thou- sand cuts when the shots are evaluated in context because the supervisors don't have access to the DI suite," he says. "But be- cause we built it into the process, we didn't have to bug the vendors with those last five percent fussy details, and they could stay focused on the fun parts." is experience has convinced Maschwitz and Rhodes that DI should be incorporated into the visual effects process. "is movie was unique because we did the final DI, because Aaron is a colorist and an associate visual effects supervisor, and we have the background," Maschwitz says, noting that e Orphanage had worked as a service bu- reau in the past using its Magic Bullet soft- ware to give footage shot with video cameras the color depth and appearance of film. "But, even if a studio doesn't do the final DI," Maschwitz adds, "it could still make significantly better decisions. I have a ton of respect for colorists, but they only see the shots once they're done, which is crazy. DI should be more deeply integrated into the process. Every visual effects studio should expect someone to hand them a LUT with their plates." Maschwitz has already put the Bunker to good use on other films. "We used it on Don't Mess with the Zohan and John Woo's Red Cliff Part 2," he adds. "e Bunker model is not restricted to stylized films. DI is playing a larger and larger role, and VFX is becoming more integrated into every type of movie." Even so, as is often the case with inno- vation in visual effects, it took a unique project to drive the change, and e Spir- it—with its unique, stylized look, comic book color, a budget that demanded smart solutions, and a producer willing to take risks—was just such a project. "All the technology existed," Maschwitz says. "No one had lined it up." ■ Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. A new soft airbrush and color-correction tools in Rising Sun Research's CineSync software let Maschwitz give feedback interactively to such studios as Riot, which created this shot.

• Cover